Keep Your Health Kick Kicking For Longer

Written by

Featured Contributor

Most of us, at some point, are going to take look at ourselves and agree that we need to change the way we live. We tighten the laces of our trainers, we stock our fridge with fresh produce and toss out all the habits that have been doing us nothing but bad. But for too many of us, we are right back in the thick of an unhealthy lifestyle before long. It’s not because we’re weak. If we slip up, it might be because of the fact we never took the right approach to changing our lifestyle, to begin with.

One of the biggest mistakes you could make in your attempts to get healthy is to throw all your effort in at once. You want to fix your diet. You want to exercise more. You want to quit your bad habits. But trying to do it all at once to the greatest extent you can is going to make it too hard on yourself. As the Health Makeover website suggests, you need to take it a little more gradually. Start with small changes and build up as you get used to them. It will feel like a lot less of an effort that way.

Don’t forget your achievements

An important way of ensuring that you’re scaling up gradually is to measure exactly what you’re doing. There are fitness metric apps like MetricMe that make it easy to measure things like the number of reps you’ve done or just how far you ran and in how long. But you should also be measuring things like how many cigarettes you smoke and what nutrition you’re gaining from the meals you eat. Measure the little victories, too. Note days where you drank more water and days that you woke up earlier. Keeping check of how far you have come is one of the easiest ways to find the motivation to keep going further. If you want to lose weight or put on muscle, consider taking pictures of your progress, too. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s hard to see aesthetic changes. When you’re able to compare over a timeframe, however, it will jump right out at you.

Don’t believe the hype

The paleo diet. Drink 8 glasses of water a day. So-called superfoods. There are a lot of fads you’re going to hear. Some will have celebrity endorsement. Some will have a huge following. But get it into your head now that there are no quick fixes, no one-size-fits-all diets or exercises. There are a lot of health myths worth ignoring. Then there is the benefit of learning about proper nutrition and proper exercise. Everything else is only going to serve as a distraction.

The best way to make sure that your ‘health kick’ doesn’t fail is to treat it like more than a ‘health kick’. Instead, make sure you’re treating it as an ongoing process that’s moving to a healthier lifestyle. Don’t give yourself too much to deal with at once. Measure your achievements. Don’t look for quick fixes.